Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Creating the food chain Golden Shiners

To delineate my GShiner reservations, especially wrt TopH2O's contemplated plans:

1) If you are interested in a big bass fishery, I think GShiners are a good forage fish.

2) If you are interested in a balanced, mixed bass fishery, I think GShiners would probably be OK and would likely be of benefit by utilizing different food resources than BG and RES.

3) Where I have reservations and questions about GShiners is in a big bream pond. I definitely warn anyone with this particular goal NOT to stock GShiners far in advance of their BG, as they have demonstrated to me the ability to lock up a great deal of the available biomass in a pond for a period of years if allowed to do so. As to the wisdom of "co-stocking" Gshiners at the same time as BG in a big bream pond, I once would have said "no" but am currently evaluating data (see FA consumption info below).

GSHiners have definitely NOT demonstrated a negative affect on BG/RES spawning numbers to me. In my pond where GShiners had a year headstart and outmassed all other fish originally (it is still probably a close contest), observation, seining, and catches have shown that BG and too a lesser extent RES have done very well at reproducing - there's lots of sunfish fingerlings, juveniles, and young adults. On the contrary, GShiner recruitment now appears to be very limited.

GShiners have shown themselves to be increasingly enthusiastic FA eaters as higher BG numbers have limited other sources of food available to them. I strongly suspect my numerous, hungry GShiners were the reason my pond had virtually NO FA last Summer, during a period when almost every pond around me was blanketed with the stuff. Examining the gastro-intestinal contents of about a dozen GShiners I caught this Winter confirmed that they were eating FA and apparently relatively little else.

In a closing note on GSHiners being a plus for large bass production, I think they have helped my LMBs stay rather fat looking dispite being what would normally be considered overstocked (200/acre) from a large bass perspective. See New Year's Day LMB photos and fat fish expert CB1's comments here.